Nudging Consumers Towards Big-Picture Thinking
The desire for instant gratification, and the battle to tame this base impulse, is a universal struggle. As the wise 13th-century Persian poet Rumi once said: “The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.”
Most animals, when presented with a treat, will gobble it up immediately. But as humans, we boast about our ability to delay gratification, though often this is because we believe a larger benefit awaits us in the future if we control ourselves.
It’s not a perfect skill by any means—but I am usually slightly better than my beagle at savoring a treat.
A theory of minds
How are we able to achieve this? A leading theory holds that it is our ability to read someone else’s mind that holds the key to the answer. Now you may be picturing the mentalist Derren Brown waving his fingers and staring intently at a volunteer from his audience, but what I am referring to is something called the “Theory of Mind.” This is the ability to imagine yourself in another person’s shoes, so to speak, though it also applies to being able to put ourselves in our own shoes in an imagined future.
Theory of mind (TOM)1 is defined as the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others, and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own. This clever little trick, in my opinion, is what really differentiates us from the animals, and is the foundation of empathy. Sure, it has been found that apes and even rats have some form of this ability,2 but we are the ones that really excel at it. And most movies would be rather boring if we didn’t.
So, does TOM allow a person to project their future self to their current self? For instance, does it allow me to mentally picture my future self having trouble fitting into my jeans after eating that third donut, and thereby stop me from picking it up? Or, in what is known as temporal discounting, does it stop me from taking a pile of money now instead of waiting to get an even bigger stash of cash later?
References
- Marraffa, M. (n.d.). Theory of Mind. IEP. https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/
- Keim, B. (2018, May 9). The Intriguing New Science That Could Change Your Mind About Rats. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2015/01/reconsider-the-rat/
- Soutschek, A. (2016). Brain stimulation reveals crucial role of overcoming self-centeredness in self-control. Science Advances. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1600992
- Saxe, R., & Kanwisher, N. (2003). People thinking about thinking people. The role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”. NeuroImage, 19(4), 1835–1842. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1053-8119(03)00230-1
- Bolognini, N., & Ro, T. (2010). Transcranial magnetic stimulation: disrupting neural activity to alter and assess brain function. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 30(29), 9647–9650. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1990-10.2010
- Ersner-Hershfield, H., Garton, M. T., Ballard, K., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., & Knutson, B. (2009). Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow: Individual differences in future self-continuity account for saving. Judgment and decision making, 4(4), 280–286.
- Affect Heuristic – Biases & Heuristics. (2020, October 5). The Decision Lab. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/affect-heuristic/
About the Author
John Laurence
John’s interest in neuroscience, consumer psychology and behavioral science led him to establish a neuromarketing agency in South Africa in 2011. Over the past decade he has developed various research methodologies utilizing EEG, GSR, eye tracking and implicit association testing. Combining these tools with insight from fields such as behavioral economics, he has worked on a variety of marketing initiatives, including ad testing, new product development, price positioning, in-store marketing and communication strategy.
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